Over the past year in
media studies I have produced many pieces of work, each time I have produced a
piece of work it should show development. This is because each time we started
a new piece of work I learnt new skills and techniques to make my work better
and improve the quality. I also gained time to practice these skills when
producing drafts and mock ups. I know that I haven’t always necessarily shown
my skills in work when I haven’t worked hard enough and put enough effort into
it. There are also times when I have worked harder to expand my development.
When I first started my
AS year at college I had to produce a perfume advert, this was the very first
project and was the first time for me to show any skills that I already had in
media. Now when I look back at this very first project I realize my skills were
very weak and the perfume advert was very simple and basic. The camera used was
of bad quality and this is shown through the final piece, I hadn’t used
Photoshop much when starting my AS year so the program was reasonably new to
me, I was getting to grips with the tools and effects that can be used on
Photoshop.
I tried to be creative
with this project but when I look back to it I think it looks very bland and
boring, there was also no real story been told in the image. I did try to link
the name ‘funn’ with an image of someone holding a balloon as a balloon can be
related to parties and childhood.
In reference to research
and planning for the perfume advert there wasn’t much at all, I gathered images
of other perfume adverts and then drew out my own plan of how I wanted mine to
look, if I was to repeat this I would have done more research such as a
questionnaire and maybe gathering feedback off some initial ideas. The lack of
research meant that my perfume ad was not specifically aimed at any particular
audience and therefore had no real meaning.
Because my convention
research was not in any depth I then did not use the codes and conventions in
my work. This is a big mistake as codes and conventions have to be used for a
piece of media work to look right, sometimes codes and conventions are broken for
reasons, examples of codes and conventions that could be used in a perfume
advert are to use a
close up shot of the model, to stick to a particular colour scheme and not
include many more colours in the image.
The next
piece of work we moved onto was a college magazine. The digital technology here
didn’t show a great amount of progress from the perfume advert. I was
disappointed with the final outcome of this piece of work. The photo its self
was not too bad. I used a medium close up of a student sat working at a
computer. When I started to use the image to create the front cover, I used
limited tool on Photoshop. I didn’t edit the photo, in order to create the
magazine I just added boxes and text on top of the main image. My Photoshop
skills were very limited and I didn’t put enough effort into making this piece
of work look a good standard.
The piece of
work isn’t very creative and was basic; I produced a college magazine front
cover that was no different to any other. I was creative in the fact that I
chose a colour scheme that would suit both male and female of college student
age.
I put more
research and planning towards this than I did the previous piece of work.
Firstly put together a mood board of all the immediate ideas that come to mind
when thinking about college, this included things such as folders, Books,
phones, friends, stationary and other things. I then created a digital mock-up
of what my magazine front cover should look like, this is useful when you come
to actually put the magazine together as you already have an idea of where
everything will go and how it fill fit onto the page. The next thing I did was
look for existing college magazines and analyse them in regards to conventions,
this helped me to spot things that were good and not so good so that I could
take that information and produce my magazine accordingly. It was useful to put
more research into this task as it gives you a better idea of what you are
going to produce and means you can deal with any issues that you may come across
quicker, research leaves you in a more confident position as you have a better
view of what the outcome may be.After producing the magazine I had to evaluate it, saying the good points, the bad points and what I would change if I was to do it again. When I was doing the evaluation i could of asked people for feedback to found out what other people thought about how it could be improved, this would of strengthened my evaluation as it would of told me what the target audience thought was good and bad about the magazine and how they thought it could of been improved.
The next piece of work we had to do was the big coursework piece. This is where I had to really push my skills forward. For this piece of work I had to create the front cover, contents page and double page spread of a music magazine. To create the magazine I had to use my own original photos, so this meant going out with a camera and taking photos that related to the genre of music. I chose rap so I had to take photos in the style of a rapper. I don’t think my photos looked professional enough because i didn’t have the right costume and props for m model, I think if I had spent more time looking for a costume that was Cleary in the right style and genre then the photos would have made the magazine better. Once I had got the photos I then edited the best ones on Photoshop ready to be used for my magazine which I also produced on Photoshop.
I tried to
be creative with my ideas, I choose a genre that not many other people had
chosen and also one that i thought would be fun to create. I tried to use the
skills I had learnt over the year creatively, using tools in different ways and
trying to use different effects, this can be seen on my final piece but I think
I could have practiced and used these skills even more to improve my work.
Research and
planning was essential to create a good magazine, I knew that a lot of work and
time should be put into this and know this is a major area of the task that I
didn’t put enough time into, my questionnaire didn’t work properly so I never
got answers from it, I did do a small focus group to find out what people
thought of my ideas, this helped but wasn’t enough. Researching other rap
magazines was really helpful as this told me what codes and conventions are
commonly found in rap magazines so that I could use these conventions in my own
work, when it came to production I did follow the conventions of rap magazines
to the best of my ability.
In regards
to the production, I believe my skills have shown improvement from my first
draft to the final piece, each time I finished a draft I took the feedback on
board and I therefore would alter and change the magazine accordingly. By the
end I had themes running through each page of the magazine had taken new
photos, I had learnt more skills over the process and was able to include
these.
